Join History of Art for the next in the Research Seminar Series chaired by Claudia Hopkins.

This lecture will be hybrid. Please book your ticket for attendance in person or online. Further details on how to access the lecture will be sent to you following booking.

The lecture will be followed by a drinks reception in the Higgitt Gallery.

Visions of Mexico: José María Velasco and the Art of Landscape

Abstract

José María Velasco (1840–1912), the most accomplished Mexican painter of the nineteenth century, has long been celebrated for his monumental representations of the Valle de México. In these meticulous but lyrical landscapes, he showcased both the young nation’s complex colonial histories and its transformative industrialisation. While Velasco has always enjoyed great prominence in Mexico – and exhibited extensively at world’s fairs and expositions in Europe and the United States during his lifetime – his work has become less familiar abroad. In spring 2025, the National Gallery will devote a monographic show to Velasco, its first-ever exhibition about a Latin American artist. Through a consideration of some of the paintings that Velasco showed in Paris at the Exposition Universelle of 1889, this lecture will trace the artist’s relationship with his own national history, analyse his critical reception, and explore the legacy of his paintings, which have become icons of Mexican art.

About Daniel

Daniel Sobrino Ralston is the CEEH Associate Curator of Spanish Paintings at the National Gallery. His research interests range from the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries, with a particular emphasis on the consolidation of the idea of the Spanish school in the 1860s and 1870s. His recent publications include the reattribution of a painting to Murillo in the catalogue of the Kimbell Art Museum’s exhibition Murillo: From Heaven to Earth (2022), and contributions on Spanish paintings in the catalogues of After Impressionism: Inventing Modern Art (2023) and Saint Francis of Assisi (2023). While at the Meadows Museum, he curated Sorolla in the Studio (2019), a focused exploration of the artist’s working methods. He is completing his PhD at Columbia University.

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